It’s been a long time coming, but Football Manager 26 is finally here. With 2025 being the first year we haven’t seen a new Football Manager game — or Championship Manager before it — since 1992, it was clear that when Sports Interactive decided to cancel last year’s planned entry to the highly regarded football management simulation game, it must’ve been in a bad way.

A couple of highlights

That will, unfortunately, be a running theme because Football Manager 26 is, for all intents and purposes, still very much a beta. There are improvements, and the important thing to keep in mind amongst all of the drawbacks is that this is still Football Manager at its core.

You’re still going to be hooked, playing for hours on end, sacrificing sleep to try and take your beloved local club to glory… It’s just that, despite all the hype and excitement around 26 being a full revamp for the series, it has significantly missed the mark.

Alongside the visually improved match engine, though, there is one other area where Football Manager 26 has genuinely improved on: tactics. For the first time in series history, you can now use two tactics simultaneously: one when you’re in possession of the ball, and another when you’re out of possession. The available player roles for any given position change, you can use an entirely different formation, the whole works. It adds an extra dynamic to tactics that we didn’t have prior, and is one of the only genuine selling points for the new game.

I’d also be remiss not to mention the inclusion of women’s football for the first time ever, and done to an impressive degree, too. There are 14 women’s leagues across 11 countries, from the world-famous Women’s Super League in England to the not-so-well-known Adran Premier next door in Wales.

Sports Interactive has 40 researchers dedicated to just the women’s game, and even though there’s no denying the mode won’t be as popular as managing in the men’s leagues, it’s a great step for representation and is crucial in helping the sport become as recognised as it deserves to be.

Delivered a year late yet still undercooked

Unfortunately, even with the post-launch 26.0.4 update, Football Manager 26 is still a buggy, feature-barren, poor excuse for a full-priced video game launch, especially one that has 20+ years of history and consistency to fall back on.

There are so many missing features in this year’s instalment that were available in previous iterations of the game, including but not limited to: International management, touchline shouts, squad depth tab, live cup draws, the data hub, create-a-club mode, versus mode, challenge mode, transfer deadline day, end of season summaries/fanfare, advanced match stats, the ability to save preset line-ups, and so many more slightly less significant removals that I could be here all day.

Not to mention the heaps upon heaps of not-quite game-breaking, but still infuriating bugs. Being able to select bench players to take penalties in a shootout, in-match text commentary that doesn’t make sense, long text wrapping and obscuring other text… again, these are just a few examples of a considerably long list.

Even though Sports Interactive revealed touchline shouts were effectively useless, providing only the most minimal of morale boosts when performed correctly, I still find my muscle memory looking for them in almost every match.

That placebo effect was very real in Football Manager 2024, and while I understand the need to revamp them before bringing it back as a feature, it’s perhaps the one I miss the most. That and transfer deadline day, specifically, thanks to missing out on a signing because the paperwork wasn’t filed until 15 minutes after the deadline, which was something the dedicated deadline day mode in FM24 would’ve prevented. Damn fax machine.

Teaching an old dog new tricks

Finally, there are the many, many UI changes. As more and more players pick up Football Manager on console — despite for the longest time, it being a PC exclusive — development caters more towards them, leading to a complete UI overhaul.

As a diehard, decade-plus player, it was hard to get used to. Even though I know how the game works at its core, I had to learn where everything was again, and it was beyond frustrating when I’d go somewhere I expected something to be, and it inexplicably wasn’t, so I had to resort to the search function.

I hesitate to call it bad UI design, though, because there’s every chance I only dislike it because it’s such a drastic change from what I’m familiar with. If you present a brand new player with both Football Manager 24 and 26 side by side, task them with learning each one, then ask which they prefer? I suspect their answer may be 26, even if we veterans are finding it tough.

As mentioned before, though, this is still Football Manager. It may be one of the worst launches the series has had, receptively from both critics and fans alike, but if you love the series despite all of its flaws, you’re going to enjoy Football Manager 26.

Especially the improved tactics and match engine, because playing tiki taka with Manchester United, in a way I know for a fact we could never do in real life, is so worth it when compared to the match engine we put up with in the series prior to now. This game is essentially a beta for Football Manager 27, and it should be treated as such.

Should you play Football Manager 26?

Play it if…